Nurture and Sustain a Culture of Collaboration, Trust, Learning, and High Expectations

In this chapter, we propose that instructional leadership need not, and should not, mean that administrators or teacher-leaders have the sole power and responsibility to determine what knowledge “counts” as academically valuable and to decide how to transmit this knowledge to students. According to ISLLC Standard 2, effective instructional leaders nurture and sustain a culture of collaboration, trust, learning, and high expectations. These leadership processes identified in the ISLLC Standard 2 are best conceived as a multidirectional, dialectical process. We use “dialectical” to underscore the open-ended, back-and-forth, conversational character of this process: instead of assuming they have all the answers (when it comes to issues of academic knowledge and family/community involvement), instructional leaders take the knowledge, values, and viewpoints of family and community members seriously. This kind of communication is sometimes called “transformative dialogue” because, as families and communities come to reconsider the relationship between their world and the too-often-distant world of the school, we teachers and administrators may find ourselves questioning our own assumptions about our students and the resources that exist in their homes and neighborhoods. Below, we outline some ways that schools, families, and communities can collaborate to define what kind of school culture-and, therefore, what kind of leadership-is likely to serve the needs of unique students in specific communities.